Follow Along as I learn to Human
In early 2020 I started doing daily writing on my notebook blog.
In principle this is about anything that happens to interest me, but an increasingly large percentage of them are about feelings, personal development, etc. How people relate to each other, how to work with your own feelings, and a number of related themes.
Why? Well because I’m bad at all of that, and because so are most of us, and writing it all down is partly to help you get better at that, and partly to help me get better at that. I described these in Initial Notes Towards a Manifesto as the basic skills of being human - these are my attempt to figure out the places where I’ve been failing at them, and to try to convey them in a way that is useful to other people.
People seem to find my notes useful, but the notebook blog is deliberately for half-formed thoughts - they’re often short pieces, they’re certainly not extensively edited (almost all of them were written in at most an hour and then immediately published with minimal or no editing), so I thought it would be useful to have a place for longer, better thought out, pieces.
It’s also, frankly, a place for me to see if I can make a bit of a career as a writer. I like writing, I think I’m good at it, but it’s not something I’ve ever really done professionally. Currently I’m sinking about 5-10 hours a week into that. Significantly more if you count all the reading and experimentation that goes into it - I’d be doing a lot of that anyway, so I’m not sure I should, but it’s definitely one of the major benefits to my readers that they don’t have to read 800 pages of anarchist theory, phenomenology, obscure Christian theology, or, worse, self-help books to do the work of synthesising it into something useful.
So if you want to see some of these longer and more thought out pieces with this synthesis, here you are. Come on in. You don’t have to pay if you don’t want to - for the moment, all of the actual writing is available publicly - but if you’d like to support the project I’d very much appreciate it.
